Trust Exercise(81)
“Is this you, then? ‘Baby Evangeline’?”
“Yes.” Had he not even understood that? There was something shaming in his making her spell it all out. But he was old, she reminded herself, though he didn’t seem old, if old meant befuddled or weak. He didn’t seem that way at all.
He raised his still mostly black and very barbed eyebrows slightly when she said yes and kept them there, in a notched-up position. The longer he held the position the more meanings it seemed to imply. One of the meanings might have been, That’s not what I expected. Another might have been, That’s exactly what I expected. Another might have been, Now I understand why this person is here. Another might have been, I can’t fathom why this person is here. “And what,” he said, his eyebrows still in that notched-up position, “makes you think that your mother was ever my student?”
Claire’s heart rate had been accelerating and now it was accelerated so much she thought it must be audible. Her cheeks had probably turned very pink. Sweat beads prickled her hairline. “Birth mother,” she corrected him. “I know because the file—”
“The file says that she was accepted in the region’s leading school for the arts. It doesn’t say she attended.”
“She did. I’m sure of it.”
“Why? Is that also made perfectly clear, somewhere else in your file? I’m sorry,” he said almost gently, when she didn’t reply. “This must be difficult for you. It must be very difficult, to have so little information about something so important. But even if the young woman described on this page was a student here, and it seems very doubtful she was, I could never confirm it.”
“Why?” Claire said, feeling him willing her out of the room.
“I could never violate a student’s privacy in that way. As a woman, you must understand that.”
Leaving the building, Claire had gotten lost. Or rather, she had never known where she was, and only went further astray. She’d found herself standing in a parking lot from which her car had disappeared, staring down at a hideous thing with two agonized faces and the word VISITOR spelled in hard little circles of metal. Eventually, she’d come to understand that she’d gone out an entrance on the opposite side of the building from where she’d come in. Both doors looked exactly the same.
* * *
THE DAY SHE showed her file to Robert Lord, Claire’s mother had been gone just six months. Initially Claire had promised herself she would wait for a year before doing anything with the soft-edged manila folder with its surprisingly few sheets of paper that her father had given her after the funeral, sitting stoop shouldered on the “good” sofa it had always made her mother nervous to have people sit on, and making Claire’s own shoulders stoop with the weight of his arm. “Mom wanted to encourage you,” Claire’s father said. “She even wanted to help. She just never figured out how.” Claire had been crying too much to answer, but she’d known that what he said was the truth. Her mother had never planned to get sick. She’d only been sixty-six when she died. Her mother never having the chance to figure out how to help saddened Claire to the point of her making that promise, but she soon admitted to herself that not touching the file for a year was an empty gesture. The first time she read it, the strength of her grief frightened her. Her one articulate wish was that her mother was with her, that they were reading it together, that her mother agreed that the person described was a friend they both wanted to find.
Claire’s father had grown up on a farm that his father lost when Claire’s father was in his teens, resulting in a move to the city that had been the catastrophe of Claire’s father’s life. In her childhood, despite her steady lack of interest in nature, he’d often as bedtime stories described to her his favorite places on his childhood farm, the creek and the barn and the shade trees. After Claire’s paternal grandfather’s death, a “farm diary” had turned up in his basement, reams of curling faded yellow paper on which a spidery hand recorded births and deaths of animals, crop yields, and unusual weather events. The day after Claire showed Robert Lord her file, she rose extremely early and went to the print shop, although it was her day off, so that she could finish typing up, printing out, and binding the farm diary for her father. She’d been meaning to do this for literally years. Then she went to her childhood home, from which her father had been threatening to move, and ate a bowl of All-Bran while watching her father page through the all-new, highly legible farm diary, which she had even illustrated with some photos of West Texas pulled off the web. Her father’s mouth formed a tight line as he read, by which Claire knew he was moved to the point of fighting tears. “Thank you, Boo-Boo,” he said after he’d turned all the pages. Claire returned to her apartment and it was still only nine in the morning. She had not mentioned her visit to Robert Lord to her father. In fact, since receiving the file from her father, Claire had never mentioned it to him again. She’d understood that, in telling her about her mother’s regret, her father had been saying far more on the subject than he would have if left to himself. This refusal of her father’s to engage with the subject had never bothered Claire, while her mother’s mere ambivalence about it had agonized her. Nor did her differing reactions to her parents bother Claire, although she recognized how unfair they were.